The Tour

Every screen,
before you install.

No mockups and no staged marketing renders — these are the actual screens, captured from the app on a phone and a tablet. Scroll through the whole study loop and decide for yourself.

The GemReader library in dark mode, showing book covers, reading progress and a daily streak

Library · every book encrypted on import

On Your Phone

Read it. Mark it.
Actually remember it.

Six screens, one library. Nothing here needs an account, a connection, or a second app.

GemReader highlight toolbar with six colour swatches over a page of The Red-Headed League
Highlighting

Six colours, one tap

Select a passage and the toolbar comes to you — colour it, attach a typed note, copy it, search it, or send it straight to your review deck. The highlight anchors to the text itself, so it stays put when you change the font size.

Six highlight colours
Typed notes with Markdown
Anchored to the text, not the page
GemReader review screen showing a flashcard built from a highlight with Again, Good and Easy buttons
Review

Your highlights, waiting as flashcards

Everything you marked shows up on the Review page as a spaced-repetition deck. Each card keeps the book and chapter it came from, so a half-remembered quote is one tap away from its context. Already run Anki? Import the .apkg and drill it here.

Built from what you already highlighted
Again / Good / Easy scheduling
Anki .apkg and .txt import
GemReader dictionary popup defining the word effusive, with an Add to deck button
Dictionary

Look a word up without losing the sentence

Tap an unfamiliar word and the definition opens over the page — the paragraph is still there behind it. If the word is worth keeping, Add to deck turns it into a flashcard on the spot.

Offline dictionary, no lookup leaves the phone
Add to deck straight from the definition
Automatic pinyin for CJK texts
An interactive workbook in GemReader with typed answers, checkboxes and a focused text field
Workbooks

Exercises that remember what you typed

Interactive EPUB workbooks render the way the author built them — free-text answers, checkboxes, multiple choice. Everything you enter saves itself as you go. Close the app mid-question and it's still filled in next week.

Answers saved per book, automatically
Survives a crash or a dead battery
No export step, no companion app
GemReader reading a chapter aloud, with the playback bar showing speed and time remaining
Read Aloud

A chapter that fits a commute

Text-to-speech narrates any book with the current sentence highlighted as it goes, plus speed control, lock-screen controls, and an estimate of how much of the chapter is left. It runs on the phone's own voices — nothing is uploaded to be read.

Follows along sentence by sentence
Lock-screen and headphone controls
Works in airplane mode
A lecture PDF in GemReader rendered in dark mode with tables and figures intact
PDFs

Lecture PDFs in the same library

Handouts, papers and scanned course readers sit on the same shelf as your EPUBs, highlight the same way, and feed the same review deck. Dark mode recolours the page instead of inverting it, so figures and tables stay legible.

Same library, same highlights, same deck
True dark mode, not an inversion
Tables and figures keep their layout
On a Tablet

Two documents.
One screen.

On a larger screen the layout opens up rather than stretching — a second document, or your notes, alongside what you're reading.

A GemReader tablet showing an EPUB novel and a PDF open side by side

A book and a PDF, side by side

Put the set text next to the lecture handout and read across both. Two documents, one app, no window juggling.

GemReader on a tablet with the Gems panel open beside the page, listing highlights and notes

Your notes beside the page

The Gems rail lists every highlight and note in the book, filtered by colour and searchable — open beside the text instead of on top of it.

The GemReader library on a tablet in dark mode, showing book covers, reading streak and a locked Secret folder

The whole shelf at a glance

Covers, progress, reading streak, and any PIN-locked folders — the wide layout puts a full term's reading on one screen.

Phone · Tablet · Same library, same annotations

Seen enough?
Open your own book in it.

Free for Android. No sign-up, no cloud, no setup — import a textbook or a PDF and start marking it up in seconds.

Android 13+ · EPUB & PDF · Free forever